The National Maritime Museum Library and Royal Observatory-Aug. 1

We climbed aboard a commuter boat early morn and traveled the River Thames upstream to Greenwich to meet our tour guide for a glimpse at the National Maritime Museum's library. Founded in 1937 the museum displays an impressive array of model ships and naval battle exhibits. The reference-only Caird ("Strive and endure") Library holds 100,000 naval-related volumes including 8,000 rare books such as naval logs, correspondence, spy books, and waggoners (pirate books). The collection dates from 1322 to the present. Items are classified according to the Universal Decimal System.

Our gracious tour guides brought out a number of archival gems for us to peruse. We saw ship logs from: the Pearl which captured Blackbeard in 1720 off the coast of North Carolina, John "Amazing Grace' Newton, HMS Bounty, and Cook's voyages. We were also privy to some of Admiral Nelson's private letters to his wife and mistress and to original pictures of Titanic life-boat survivors taken by a photographer on the Carpathian.

Nearby Royal Observatory sits atop a stEEp hill. Some of us huffed-and-puffed to the top. There is a great eastward view of London. The Royal Observatory venue is the earth's time and space benchmark. It is here where all of earth's clocks and longitude are calibrated and measured. It is here where you can have one foot in the western hemisphere and one foot in the eastern hemisphere (as fellow librarian Nancy demonstrates). It is here where you can watch the big red ball drop at 1 pm. It is here where you can watch and listen as the Observatory's importance is explained. And it is here where you can see closeup, John Harrison's revolutionary, super-precise, robust, 18th century maritime clocks that helped solve the centuries-old problem of determining longitude.